Security Aspects in Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANETs): Technical Review

Abstract

Mobile Ad hoc networks (MANETs) are a new paradigm of wireless network, offering unrestricted mobility without any underlying infrastructure such as base station or mobile switching centers. Basically ad hoc network is a collection of nodes communicating with each other by forming a multi-hop network. In a mobile ad hoc network, it is much more vulnerable to attacks than a wired network due to its limited physical security, dynamically changing network topology, energy constrained operations and lack of centralized administration. Since all the nodes in the network collaborate to forward the data, the wireless channel is prone to active and passive attacks by malicious nodes, such as Denial of Service (DoS), eavesdropping, spoofing, etc. The intent of this paper is to investigate the security goal, security challenges and different types of active and passive attacks on MANETs.